Credits

Tom Merritt
Gina Trapani
Nate Lanxon
Jason Howell

Segments

Top Stories

Why's everybody picking on ChromeOS?
-Gmail Founder says Chrome OS is DOA
-Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

Appeals court: warrant required before Feds can read e-mail
-Breaking News on EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment

FBI Investigating Gawker Hack
-Gawker Password Mess Spreads to World Of Warcraft, And Apparently to Yahoo
-The Top 50 Gawker Media Passwords

Other Stories

U.S. Air Force blocks NY Times and Guardian over WikiLeaks

France Says Google Is Main Cause Of News Publishers’ Woes

Comcast’s ‘Xcalibur’ Seeks The Edge On Google TV

Microsoft to demo new slate PCs, Windows 8 tablet functionality at CES?
-Microsoft Will Use CES To Push A Slate Of Slates
-Report: Microsoft to Show Off Windows 7 Slider Tablet at CES

News Fuse

Really want to hit the old guard where it hurts, hit them in their mimeographs! Except those aren't networked. Next best thing? Their fax machines! Office managers at Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal, Visa and others apparently can no longer receive faxes. It's all part of Mission Leakfloods denial of service attack attack against fax numbers.

A database leak in Mesa County, Colorado made public the information of 200,000 suspects, victims, and informants working with the sheriff's department there. A county IT employee who had legal access to the database, copied it to another server in April, saving it as a giant unencrypted plaintext file. The server was discovered and the info spread about the Internet.

Meanwhile Julian Assange was granted bail at £200,000 as long as he hands over his passport, wears an electric monitor AND checks in with the police every night before he returns toEllingham Hall where he's staying. Even with all that, Assange is still not free to roam as Sweden has appealed the decision and he'll stay in jail until their appeal is heard.

Fred Silverman, who headed up all three major US TV broadcasters in the 1970s, and green-lighted classics like All in the Family and The Waltons, has a new project. At the end of December expect a media push for Blip City, a live streaming video social network thing. According to a job posting the site will "rock the entertainment world in the areas of mobile, online, TV and celebrity."

In November 2009, Hank Risan of BlueBeat put up the entire Beatles catalog online for sale at around 25 cents a song. EMI of course immediately sued. But Risan claimed they weren't Beatles songs but "psycho-acoustic simulations with entirely new and original sounds”. Judge Josephine Stanton Tucker said no, they're Beatles songs and found BlueBeat liable for copyright infringement, misappropriation, unfair competition, and conversion.”

Amazon's MP3 application is now available for download from the BlackBerry App World. The app will let you purchase and download music both over WiFi and over the air, and it includes plenty of BlackBerry-specific functionality, including sharing via BBM in addition to the usual social networking features, and full integration with BlackBerry's Universal Search and Media Library.

The U.S. Army is considering giving each of its soldiers a smartphone, and may give them a choice between Apple's iPhone or one running Google Android, as well as pay the monthly bill. The plan would make it easier for soldiers to access data and receive updates on the go. Commercial phones would fit into special antenna sleeves, allowing them to link to the Army's network via a "patchwork of ground stations and airborne nodes."

Google released an updated version of its Google Voice app for the iPhone on Tuesday that added support for the iPod touch and iPad. The update also added support for placing calls with Click2Call, added a Do Not Disturb setting, a Text forwarding preference in the app, improved Address Book support, and fixed several bugs.

Kickers and Weird Science

OK Go uses GPS, crowd to spell out name in LA

Calendar

Best Buy tells the Nexus S retail story: 8AM online sales, two per customer maximum

Leaked details on the quantity of Nexus S at Best Buy stores. (Non-T-Mobile locations will have approx. 4 units on average. T-Mobile locations from 35-70 units on average)

IBM is taking their chess-playing supercomputers on to a new challenge. Jeopardy! The game show Jeopardy! Two of the show's most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against 'Watson,' a computer program developed by IBM's artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16. What is, publicity stunt Alex?

Be a part of TNT this holiday season!


Voicemail

Question about ChromeOS vs. other OS's.

Anonymous: Password manager security

Email

"Hi Tom and Crew,

Congrats on giving good password advice on the Gawker story.

Heard you mention password managers are a good way to ensure you use a different password on every site.

There is another option that I thought you might be interested in as its quite cunning.

Its called pwdhash (from Stanford University) and what it does is it takes your password and the URL of the site you are logging into and creates a hash based on them.

pwdhash is a browser plugin (chrome and firefox) so you enter your regular password into a the login form but you press F2 before typing it in to signal that pwdhash should replace the password with a hash.

This means each site you log into using pwdhash has a unique password and that you only need to remember one password.

Also if you are logging in on a computer thats doesn't have the plugin installed theres a web based version of pwdhash, (https://www.pwdhash.com/) this is safer than it sounds as you never give it your username and the hash is calculated client side (nothing is sent to the server).

Cheers, Mike"


"TNT,

The Best Ever Tablet PC to get come January 2011! http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/14/nook-color-android-tablet-update/ Nice hardware, and now a real Andiod device. So you get a 100% tablet PC like an iPad but better, that is also a perfect ebook reader. Barnes and Noble just ""Owned"" this market and for $250! I am getting one for sure.

Craig"